★★★
M, 134 minutes
It's old-fashioned. Terry George, director of The Promise, agrees with the film's critics on that point.
The difference is that he believes it's necessarily old-fashioned – a romantic saga built on the David Lean model by way of persuading audiences to see a film about the Armenian genocide. And it's an understandable argument. There is not only the horrific nature of the Turkish government's massacre of 1.5 million of its Armenian population between 1915 and 1922. There are also the difficulties presented by Turkey's persistence in denying it ever happened.
MGM tried and failed to make a film about the genocide in the 1930s. Clark Gable was to have starred in an adaptation of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Austrian novelist Franz Wurfel until the Turkish government threatened an international campaign against the film. And the Canadian independent Atom Egoyan, who is of Armenian descent, also found himself in a fight with "the denialist lobby" over his 2002 film Ararat. According to Variety, Miramax, Ararat's distributors, were bombarded with so many negative responses that its website crashed.
With these precedents working against it, The Promise would not have been made if it hadn't been for Kirk Kerkorian, a former head of MGM, whose family fled the Ottoman pogroms. Shortly before his death in 2015, Kerkorian put up the finance for the film, which was budgeted at $100 million, quite a chunk of money for an independent production.
George, who told the story of another genocide in Hotel Rwanda (2004), plots a careful course between romance and history, with romance coming out on top. It's an international cast. The ever-adaptable Oscar Isaac, whose career has seen him play Mexican, French, Russian and Indonesian, is cast – quite credibly – as the Armenian hero Mikael Boghosian.
French-Canadian Charlotte Le Bon is the Armenian girl he loves and Christian Bale supplies the American element that seems to be essential to any historical epic that comes out of the US, whether or not the Americans had a significant role to play. He's a hard-drinking, hot-headed yet gallant American correspondent who insists on staying in Turkey to report on the massacre.
The action begins in 1915 with a glimpse of paradise. Mikael leaves his poor but happy village in southern Turkey to study medicine, having promised his new fiancee (Angela Sarafyan) he will be back in two years to marry her. Arriving in Constantinople, he finds a luminous fairytale city rich in possibilities.
His uncle, a prosperous Armenian merchant, welcomes him to his sunlit villa on the Bosphorus and five minutes later he's already regretting his engagement because he's fallen for Le Bon's Ana Khesarian. Paris-educated, she's working as tutor to his uncle's children but she also has a lover – Bale's Chris Myers. Wearing a moustache that is a performance in itself, he spots the couple's growing attraction to one another and morosely takes another hit of whisky.
But Turkey's entry into the war as Germany's ally soon puts an end to paradise, scattering the cast in various directions. Chris and Ana escape to the south so that he can get another angle on the war, while Mikael is shipped off to a labour camp. Death from starvation and overwork is imminent when he's saved by a series of niftily choreographed exploits of the "with one leap, Jack was free" variety.
Then he, too, heads south, speeding towards his inevitable reunion with Ana at such a rate you could be excused for imagining Turkey to be the size of Lord Howe Island, if it weren't for the effort that George's cameras put into evoking the country's desert flatlands, pine forests and rocky hillsides.
It's a handsome film and George manages to keep the genocide in focus with shots of the Turks herding long lines of refugees across the desert expanses. But the full horror is kept at one remove. Either it remains in the middle distance or we arrive for the aftermath – to be told rather than shown. And I can't pretend to be sorry about that, given the savagery with which the killings were carried out. At the same time, the facts of it all have been shoehorned so tightly – and tritely – into an over-familiar narrative formula that you don't feel a thing.